


Horsepower

by DesertScribe



Category: The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Genre: F/M, Modern Fantasy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-04 01:28:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20462777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Question: How wonderful might a Wonder Horse be in a world with magic in it?Answer: Wonderful enough to be a bicycle.  Wonderful enough to be a 1976 Ford Pinto.  Among other things...Wait, what?





	Horsepower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Missy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/gifts).

**1989:**

There wasn't much in the way of magical wildlife left in this part of California beyond jackalopes, the occasional the occasional sidehill gouger, and other such lesser fearsome critters. Some folks, including some of Brisco's various friends and acquaintances in the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, had talking about wanting to reintroduce dragons back into some of the country's national parks and national forests to help restore the regions to their original ecological conditions, but most of that talk had died down recently, what with the way that Yellowstone was currently burning out of control without the help of any firebreathing lizards.

Personally, Deputy U.S. Marshal Brisco County, Sr. hoped all that talk would stay as nothing more than talk. He was earning a reputation as one of the best men in the business for finding and apprehending targets who weren't always one hundred percent human, but he much preferred dealing with ordinary human criminals, and when he was off the clock he liked dealing with ordinary human problems. Take today, for example. He didn't know which was blistering faster, the palms of his hands which weren't used to manual labor or the back of his neck which was getting cooked by the sun because his hat was at the wrong angle to shade it while he was bent over digging. Whichever contestant won that particular race, he lost, but there was a certain satisfaction he could take from the situation all the same, and there was no way that he was going to complain about any of it where his young son could hear.

Destiny is a strange and fickle force, especially in a world with magic in it. You might almost be tempted to call it funny, but there's nothing funny about destiny once you take a minute to think about what it really means to have one. Brisco wasn't thinking about Destiny at the moment, though, because he was too busy thinking about the paradox of how he wished that his five year old son would watch less television but at the same time also wished that he would watch more of it.

On the one hand, television had gone and given the kid the idea that he could save the world. On the other hand, if Junior were inclined to sit around and watch even more television, then the entire family, all three of them, would not be spending Brisco's day off out under the far too hot sun with shovels in hand. Ruth seemed to think the whole thing was cute, but then she was the one with the wide brimmed sunhat which seemed ridiculously large until you realized that it was the only hat in sight to be actually, at which point hers suddenly didn't seem like the ridiculous one on display here, and she was the one who did enough gardening on a regular basis that her hands had probably developed the right kind of calluses for this work years ago.

Later, years in the future, once he could see Destiny's metaphorical fingerprints all over everything, there would still be a part of Brisco that wanted to blame Sesame Street or whatever kids' show Junior had been watching that told him that everyone should go out and plant as many trees as they could and in doing so save the environment and the world. In the here and now of 1989, Brisco blamed Sesame Street with his whole being. Not that Brisco objected to any of its teachings in theory, of course. No, he was all in favor of leaving the world a better place than he had found it, but he figured that if they really wanted to make a difference by planting trees, then there were better places to do it than in the bone dry high chaparral that made up the County family lands. Unfortunately, Junior had also latched onto the idea of "change starts at home," which Brisco was pretty sure was more about doing things like not wasting resources, but neither he nor Ruth had been able to think of a good way to communicate that idea to a five year old, which was why they were planting trees in the nearly rock hard sun baked earth of the back yard.

It took hours, but at long last they finally put the last of the small saplings in place and doused the whole area with a hose. After they all had spent a minute surveying their handiwork, Ruth took Brisco by the hand. Presumably to lead him back inside, and he couldn't help wincing and drawing a hissing a sharp inhalation through his teeth as she made contact with several of his blisters.

"Sometimes you're as bad as your son," Ruth chided Brisco as she turned his hand over and saw the extent of the damage.

"He's your son too, last I checked," Brisco replied.

"And that's a good thing for you, Mister," Ruth said, gently poking Brisco in the chest with her free hand for emphasis, "because that means I know where all the first aid supplies are kept around here. C'mon, let's go get you cleaned up. You wash these out while I collect the band-aids and Neosporin." She gave him a kiss on the cheek and then gave him a push in the direction of the house while calling to their son, "How about you, Brisco? Do you have any booboos on your hands I need to fix?"

"Nope. See?" Junior said, proudly showing off small hands which were filthy but otherwise unmarked, which wasn't much of a surprise given how Ruth and Brisco had kept most of the digging for themselves while only letting their son put the seedlings in the holes and scrape the loosened dirt over their root balls, specifically to avoid such a problem, but he didn't need to know that part.

"That's great, honey," Ruth said, and Brisco didn't need to turn to see the happy smile on her face, because he could hear it in her voice. "In that case," she said, "why don't you turn off the water to the hose and put the tools back in the shed while I help your father? Then, when we're done, we can celebrate with milk and cookies."

At the promise of cookies, Junior let out a whoop of joy, grabbed the nearest shovel, and started dragging it off toward the shed as fast as his little legs could carry him, while Ruth and Brisco headed into the house.

A few minutes later, Junior came running inside, shouting, "Mom, Dad, I met a horse!"

"A horse?" Ruth said as she and Brisco looked at each other in confusion. Not many people in the area kept horses anymore. Most, the Counys included, hadn't wanted to continue paying for feed and upkeep when the economy started taking its downturn. The Cavendishes were the closest family who still had any, and they were miles out beyond the far side of town. Besides, Brisco and Ruth brought Junior over there often enough for him to know all of those horses by name. "I wonder who it could have escaped from," she mused aloud while Brisco wondered the exact same thing.

"Can you tell me what the horse looked like, son?" Brisco asked, and only Ruth's hold on his writs as she continued to tend to his blisters kept him from reaching out and unintentionally giving his son a scalpful of Neosporin while affectionately ruffling his hair. "Because it may be my day off, but that doesn't mean I won't chase down a fugitive if I have to."

"He was big and orange and had a white mark on his face," Junior said. He drew an imaginary line with his finger from the middle of his forehead down the bridge of his nose to show where. "He had three white socks, too."

That information came as something of a relief to both Ruth and Brisco. Even though there wasn't enough water in the area to tempt any kelpies or pookahs into taking up residence, not with most of the local stream beds always running dry early in the summer and staying that way until the rains started up again in the fall, there were occasional reports of something passing through and causing trouble along its way to more fertile hunting grounds. However, most beings known to take equine shape without having been born to it preferred to appear as black horses with rarer instances of white or smoky gray. If the horse Junior saw was a sorrel with bits of white, then it was probably just a horse.

Still, it was better to be safe than sorry, so after everyone had gotten cleaned up and Junior had settled in front of the television with his celebratory milk and cookies, Brisco went back outside to check the area. Sure enough, there was a set of horse tracks in the dust, wandering in across the property line, then up to and around the newly planted trees, and then away again. The tracks were very obviously made by a horse sporting regular nailed-on horseshoes, yet another sign this was no fae beast or even a wild horse that had wandered away from one of the small herds which still roamed parts of the West. Brisco gave another brief thought to going after the animal, but the tracks looked like they were heading down the hill towards town, where there were sure to be plenty of people with hands less blistered and sore than Brisco's who would be all too happy to corral and care for a rogue horse until its owner inevitably came searching for it.

Brisco, meanwhile, would much prefer to spend that time with Ruth and Junior. He felt bad about having to spend so much of his time travelling for work, and Junior was growing up so fast that it was already obvious that the number of peaceful days they would have together like this were limited. Brisco took one last look at the tracks and then headed back to the house. Maybe there would be some old Western movie playing as an afternoon matinee on one of the few channels their television's antenna could pick up, he had always liked those.

There was indeed a Western playing on TV, and all three members of the County family settled in with milk and cookies to watch it.

By the time he headed down into town later that night for a quick drink and a chat with Bob to get caught up on what few happenings around town Ruth wouldn't have known about, Brisco had already forgotten about the horse to the point that he didn't even think it was worth troubling Bob with the question of if anyone else had seen it around. By the time he got into the office the next morning to be told that he was being sent off to lead another manhunt, Brisco had forgotten about the horse entirely. And if Ruth's later reports were to be believed (and he always believed her) and Junior had taken to pretending that his bicycle was a horse and talking to it at every opportunity until she had felt the need to tell the boy that he was getting too old to have an imaginary friend, then Brisco was more inclined to attribute it to the influence of the movie that they had watched together than anything else.

* * *

**1996:**

It was the wrong time of year for apples, but there were other reasons to visit the apple trees at the edge of the County family property than just to pick fruit.

Brisco found Junior exactly where he thought he would, down on the ground under the furthest apple tree from the house, the one that grew Granny Smith apples even though the woman they had bought them from had promised they were all McIntosh Reds because little Junior had been very insistent that apples weren't "right" if they weren't red. When the trees bore fruit for the first time two years later, Brisco and Ruth had braced themselves for a seven-year-old's wrath when they saw the one tree's apples weren't turning red as they ripened, but their son had accepted the revelation with surprising equanimity for one so young. They had never seen little Junior eating any of those apples, but he had always made sure to keep one in his bicycle's front basket whenever they were available.

Now that bike and its training wheels had been replaced with a dirt bike, and Junior wasn't so little anymore, and Brisco did his son the courtesy of pretending not to notice how obvious it was that he had been crying. Instead of saying anything, Brisco stared up into the leaves of the apple tree, which just like Junior was not particularly tall yet but was growing fast. It was easier to look up there than down at his son who was lying with his arm hooked around his dirt bike's handlebars the way that some other twelve-year-old might wrap their arm around the neck of a big lazy dog.

Junior hadn't fallen off of the dirt bike, Brisco knew. The boy was not lying like that as the result of any kind of an accident, at least not one that had happened today. No, Brisco had watched Junior walk that dirt bike, also known as Comet 3.0 (the child-sized bike it had replaced had been Comet 2.0, but Brisco couldn't remember what the original Comet might have been. Maybe one of Junior's toy cars, or maybe one of the cartoon characters he used to like?), out across the backyard and lower it down under the tree and then sink down to join it.

For a long time, neither of them said anything, and the silence stretched longer and longer, until finally Brisco sighed in a way that he hoped communicated at least a fraction of the sorrow and regret he was feeling, turned to Junior, and said, "You just stay out here for as long as you want, son, and when you're ready to come in, we can, oh, I don't know, order a pizza or something for dinner."

"Thanks, dad," Junior muttered, briefly meeting Brisco's gaze before going back to staring at not much of anything in particular.

Brisco sighed again and headed back to the house. Behind him, Junior must have shifted his position, because the rubber treads of the dirt bike's tire scraped against the tree with a noise that sounded almost like a horse's wicker.

"Quiet, Comet," Junior hissed. "Dad's doing the best he can."

Brisco just kept walking. Ruth would have known what to say, but their whole problem was that Ruth was gone. She was dead, and twelve years old was far too young for a boy to lose his mother. Hell, Brisco was certain that thirty seven years old was far too young for a man to lose his wife, so he wasn't about to begrudge his son a little acting out in odd ways. The child psychologist who had talked with Junior after the crash had told Brisco that it was all just a coping mechanism to help him process the trauma of the accident.

Brisco hoped to someday develop a coping mechanism of his own, because so far nothing seemed to be working.

* * *

**2001:**

Brisco had a bad feeling for days now. He refused to call it a premonition, because the County family didn't have that kind of foresight running in their line the way that some did. However, he didn't need The Sight to see what was right out in the open to the point of being blatantly obvious to any idiot except the idiot who had just gotten accepted to Harvard and decided to try paying for his future education in one of the most foolhardy ways possible. Therefore, when Junior and his friend Donovan Joe headed up into the mountains for what was supposed to be a fast and easy apprehension of a group of repeat offender Fairy Dust runners and then didn't come back by nightfall, Brisco knew something had gone wrong.

It wasn't magic that let him know, it was simple math. Two overconfident teenagers plus an unknown number of the Swill clan equaled trouble.

Junior was lucky to still be alive when Brisco found him bleeding and slumped over the steering wheel of his Ford Bronco out in the back country. There was no sign of Donovan Joe or any of the Swill family, but Brisco had a hard time caring about any of that just then as he wrestled his unconscious son out of "Comet 5.0" (Comet 4.0 had been Junior's first car, an old junker of a 1976 Ford Pinto that Junior had won in a poker game at age sixteen, then spent far more time irritably muttering to himself while tinkering with its innards than he ever spent driving it, and then traded in as soon as he scraped together the money for the Bronco) and into the backseat of Brisco's own vehicle because there wasn't anywhere for a Medevac helicopter to land.

It was a difficult juggling game, navigating them through the rocky terrain at speed while radioing ahead for help and keeping one eye on Junior to make sure that he hadn't died while Brisco wasn't looking. He had been in situations that were similar to this when things got tough at work, but those times never involved the possibility of losing his only child, and his growing certainty that he was running out of time wasn't helping his clarity of focus in the slightest bit. At one point, the only thing which saved Brisco from accidentally driving them into a deep gully was one of the tires going over a small stone in such a way that the steering wheel jerked itself over in the opposite direction, lurching them away from disaster.

The violent motion was enough to briefly rouse Junior, who slurred out, "Woah! Easy there, Comet," before falling unconscious once more.

Brisco let the radio handset drop in favor of clutching the steering wheel with both hands, but even so he felt like he barely had any control over the car at all. The wheel seemed to fight him, and sometimes the gas pedal and the brake did too, but there were no more such near misses. Brisco was so busy struggling to maintain some semblance of control over the vehicle that he did not stop to think about how unnaturally smooth the resulting ride was until he was at the hospital and shakily relating the events to Bob while they waited for the surgeons to dig the bullet out of Junior's back.

The car drove normally when Brisco went home the next morning to finally get a clean change of clothes after spending the night at Junior's bedside, but he decided he should get it looked at anyway. The exorcist who he took it to didn't find anything wrong, but she went ahead and performed a spiritual cleansing ritual on it, just in case, but there was no detectable effect.

By the time all that was finished, Brisco felt like he had already been away from the hospital for too long, so he headed back to the hospital. Taking the car to be examined by an ordinary mechanic would have to wait until later. Brisco doubted that the mechanic would find anything, anyway. With the way the car was handling now, whatever had taken control of it was either gone or content to stay very quiet when it wanted to be.

When Brisco arrived at the hospital, he took a quick walk around the building to stretch his legs before going inside. The thin strip of grass growing along the side of the building where Junior's room was located was all torn up as if something heavy and wearing horseshoes had been pacing back and forth over it all night long.

Brisco spent all of Junior's recovery time wondering whether the young man might benefit from a visit to the exorcist more than the car had. He was still wondering and not yet acting on it when Junior packed up his things and hightailed it for the East Coast a good two months before his dorm would be open for freshman move-in day. Brisco let him go and hoped he was making the right choice.

* * *

**2019:**

So that was what Comet really looked like, Brisco thought as he looked at the latest in his son's long history of vehicle ownership and saw both the car and a surprisingly ordinary looking horse which was somehow simultaneously occupying the exact same space as the car in a way that only made sense once you were able to perceive all the dimensions of the universe instead of just the three most of the living world was limited to.

Being dead tended to change a person's perspective on the world, both literally and figuratively, and once you've seen it all from the outside, being called to step back into the realm of mortal perception was almost as strange feeling as being involuntarily forced out of it had first seemed. No, it was even stranger, Brisco mused, because everyone died sooner or later, but not many people were able to come back however briefly, so the return trip was the less natural of the two. Strange as it was, Brisco still would not miss the chance in exchange for anything, though, not when it meant getting to talk to Junior again one more time before they were once again both on the same side of the dividing line between life and what comes after.

There was so much that Brisco wasn't allowed to tell Junior directly. He couldn't tell him about what he now knew about his son's Destiny and how Junior had been right all those years ago when the boy had said that he was going to save the world. He couldn't tell him that Brisco and Ruth and everyone else who had left the world behind were all so damn proud of him even when he let his life get a little ridiculous. He wasn't even allowed to tell his son that it was possible to both have a concussion and be visited by a real ghost at the same time.

However, there was at least one thing that Brisco realized he could tell Junior without any need for hedging, vagueness, or insinuation, and so Brisco went ahead and told him.

"You still talk to your car too much."

Brisco just rolled his eyes in exasperation while Comet, who was currently wearing a 2016 Mustang with bright copper paint and a pearl white racing stripe down the nose, shook out his mane and gave a dismissive whinny, which in the physical world translated to a small rev of the engine and a swaying of the green apple air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

Yes, those two were definitely made for each other, perhaps literally. Not even Brisco with all his outsider information was certain in that regard. Either way, he was happy to take a moment to appreciate that there would always be somebody around to look out for his boy, even if that someone was a supernatural horse with a questionable sense of humor and/or an over- fondness for Ford products.

And then it was time to get down to business again, because this business with Bly and the Orbs was not going to sort itself out on its own….

**The End**


End file.
